


Spend the Last Hour of Light Pretending

by loveyajules (hatsforhouseelves)



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Flashbacks, Memories, Photographs, Pining, Writing Exercise, i guess? i mean he just misses julia, magnus goes off to fight the rebellion and has to leave julia and steven behind, magnus misses julia, that's pretty much the whole plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 20:12:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16249016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hatsforhouseelves/pseuds/loveyajules
Summary: Magnus did not bring with him a vengeance or a bloodlust when he left. He did not bring his father’s temper or his mother’s silence. All he bought was a homemade axe, his two good hands, his love of others. He brought a need for justice, a refusal to watch idly as innocent people got hurt, and a photograph he carried in his breast pocket for luck.





	Spend the Last Hour of Light Pretending

**Author's Note:**

> title is a quote from the things they carried by tim o'brien, which is currently my favorite book

The day Magnus Burnsides left home to lead a rebellion, he felt a certainty in his heart that he would not be returning. It wasn’t pessimism or even fear. It was a fact, plain and simple, as true as anything he had ever known: he was probably going to die. Magnus was no soldier, no killer. He wasn’t a strategist, he didn’t have the brains for that. Magnus did not bring with him a vengeance or a bloodlust when he left. He did not bring his father’s temper or his mother’s silence. All he bought was a homemade axe, his two good hands, his love of others. He brought a need for justice, a refusal to watch idly as innocent people got hurt, and a photograph he carried in his breast pocket for luck.  
The photograph had been taken by Steven Waxman. Steven was Magnus’s mentor, teaching him metalworking and carpentry, and treating Magnus as a surrogate son. The subject of the photograph was Steven’s daughter, Julia Waxman, looking beautiful and clever, caught mid-laugh with a secret in her eyes, like she was sharing in a private joke. Her hair was pulled away from her forehead with a red bandana and her cloak was slipping off her right shoulder, the picture catching her in the moment before she pulled the cloak back up again to hide the slip of dark skin again.   
The night after Magnus left home to lead a rebellion, he sat alone in a tent, shivering, and stared at the photograph he had carried all day in his breast pocket. At Julia, her smiling eyes, her curly hair hidden under that red bandana. Her shoulder peeking through a crack of fabric, like a secret, like a promise. 

Magnus remembered that shoulder, the warmth of it, the scar there, the dark brown skin. He remembered the last time he touched her shoulder- he was working in the forge, and Julia was there, too, because she always was, and she walked around to where he was hammering away at something, a sword hilt or maybe it was a horseshoe. Julia stood beside him and when he was hunched over working she was taller than he was, and even when he stood up to brush the hair off his sweaty forehead and blink sweat and dust out of his eyelashes she was only an inch or two shorter than him. Julia was tall and strong and she had dark skin, deep brown and smooth and perfect, even where it was pink puckered with scars, it was perfect there, and where she had hard calluses on her hands, perfect. She had smiled at him, her black eyes laughing, and when she smiled she got a dimple, just one, in her right cheek. The forge was hot that day. It was hot everyday, but Magnus remembered the heat on that day in particular. Julia had stripped off her shirt sometime around midday, unshy about the implications, and she was only wearing her undershirt, skin-tight and sleeveless, and it was making Magnus blush to be so close to her bare arms, but maybe that was just the heat from the flames and the work he was doing, forming a sword hilt or maybe a horseshoe.  
Julia had been smiling, showing her dimple and her crooked bottom teeth, and she had said something funny. Magnus didn’t remember what she had been saying but he remembered laughing with her, and then she had shoved at his arm and he had shoved her back, his large, sweaty hand pushing against her dark and perfect shoulder, and she had kept smiling, black eyes getting softer and softer until neither of them were laughing but Magnus still didn’t move his hand away. Her shoulder was warm, soft under his palm, the small scar slightly raised. Magnus kept his hand there until Julia looked away, eyes soft and almost sad in the kind of way that made Magnus ache and pull his hand back. And then Julia had smiled sadly and said something about luck, and being careful, because Julia was not stupid and knew that Magnus was not the kind of person to see injustice without doing something about it, and then she was shrugging her shirt back on and patting Magnus’s shoulder on her way out and then Magnus was alone, hands empty, looking down at the half-formed sword hilt on the anvil, or was it a horseshoe? 

Magnus did not cry the night after he left his home to lead a rebellion. He did not mourn either, because Julia was also not the kind of person to see injustice and sit by helplessly. Magnus knew it was only a matter of time before she joined him to fight, bringing nothing with her but a discontent for the way things were, a belief things could get better, and a sword she had crafted herself. She would not bring a picture of Magnus. She would not stare longingly at a photograph of a knee or an ear or a shoulder and see anything but a body, skin stretched over muscle stretched over bone. Julia was never poetic or sentimental: a shoulder to her was just a shoulder, not a lingering touch or a missed opportunity or the very real possibility of death drawing closer. Julia was clever but she was unpretentious, she saw things as they were and nothing more or less than that. Magnus was no poet either, not by any stretch of the imagination, but he could never seem to separate what was from what could be. Magnus couldn’t look at a tree without seeing the wood, the grains, the shapes he could build from it, the purposes it could serve. He could not look at a photograph without seeing the laughter in her eyes, the slip of a cloak, the flash of a shoulder. He could not look at her shoulder without seeing the things he didn’t do that day, the silence he wished he could fill with something brave. 

If Magnus had been even an ounce more selfish, he might have held on longer. He might have laid Julia back against the work table and kept touching her shoulder, first with his fingers and then his lips and tongue and teeth. He could have touched that shoulder for hours, all afternoon and all evening and late into the night, or he could have at least kept his hand against her skin for a minute longer, a second. Feel her skin and the warmth underneath, know there was a heart there, pumping blood, making her real and whole and human. Magnus wished he would have held on. He looked at the picture and imagined a thousand ways he could have been brave.

**Author's Note:**

> i... don't really know what this is. this started as a writing exercise inspired by the things they carried by tim o'brien. if you've read that book you'll probably be able to see his influence (i mean i basically ripped off the whole elbow thing from the left knee thing). i read the things they carried for my rhetoric class and fell in love with o'brien's writing style, so i guess this is an exercise inspired by him. it definitely got away from me. i kind of want to do one for taako and merle, too, like a snapshot of an important event in their pre-gerblins lives... who knows.
> 
> don't forget to leave comments!! reading them is literally my favorite thing in the world! 
> 
> my taz tumblr is @loveyajules  
> my main blog is @yellowpaintwater


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